Children and Families Bill

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)]

I am reluctant to query the noble Baroness because I am aware of her huge expertise in this area and have enormous respect for her, but in my amateur ignorance I do not see in the Bill or the amendment anything which assumes that the local authority must consider adoption. The amendment refers only to where the local authority is considering adoption; it does not say that it must consider adoption. If I have missed the wording somewhere else, I hope that somebody will put me right, but the noble Baroness’s third consideration seems not to appear in the Bill.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

I, too, welcome the Minister to his first Grand Committee day of a Bill and thank him for his time over the summer in dealing with some of my concerns. As I listened to the debate, my mind went back to a meeting four months ago with women whose children had been taken away from them in the 1950s and 1960s. At the time, they were single women and were strongly encouraged to give their child away. Those women bitterly regretted having done so and were campaigning for an apology from government. It is unlikely that this Bill will result in women campaigning in 20 or 30 years’ time for an apology from Parliament for what is being done now, but we really have to raise our game. It is clear that if we took a more consistent approach towards to some of these vulnerable families and helped a few more parents off drugs and alcohol, as we could well do, we would not need to take their children away. We must not be too optimistic and allow children to be kept in those families and be harmed, but we see through the effectiveness of Louise Casey’s focused work with troubled families and through District Judge Crichton’s work in the family drug and alcohol court that, where a real effort is made and where central government is prepared to step up and take responsibility, we can make a difference with those families. I welcome what the Government are doing, but some of these children would not have to be taken into care if we raised the overall quality of our child and family practice.

This debate highlights the great judgment required of child and family social workers. They are in the position of making that lifetime decision: will a child stay with its birth family in kinship care or will it be removed for adoption? I welcome the huge investment that this Government and the previous Government have made in raising the status of child and family social work through the social work college, the new post of Chief Social Worker and the Munro review. Despite those all being very helpful inputs, a social worker who was training in London—an intelligent woman—said to me last week, “I was bitterly disappointed by my training. I didn’t get the feedback. Many of my fellow students felt the same way. I’m now going to Bristol to carry on my training in social work”. There is therefore an awfully long way to go in the nuts and bolts of getting the social work profession to where it needs to be to serve those families properly.

What progress are we making in the retention of child and family social workers? People are saying—I heard it said again recently—that we are getting the best young English social workers into the profession now and have seen a great improvement over the past two years, but are we succeeding in retaining those young people? Are we managing to retain experienced social workers close to the front line so that they can mentor and support those child and family social workers?

I have one final question for the Minister, which he might care to write to me about. It is a concern raised in the past by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and raised today by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, about the outcomes for children in adoptive placements. We need robust evidence about outcomes for children in adoptive placements. We have them already for children in kinship placements. We need to compare, contrast and make good policy decisions based on those. I hope that the Minister can give an assurance that, if that cannot be produced at the moment, research projects will be put in place so that in future we know how stable those adoptive placements are. The worst outcome would be for a child or children to be placed for one or two years, to be settled, and then to be rejected again by their new family. I am sorry to have gone on so long.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interests. I, too, was a member of the Adoption Legislation Select Committee. I have what feels like a lifelong involvement with Action for Children, which certainly goes back to when I was very small and collecting money for the National Children’s Home, which has changed its name a few times. I think I am now an ambassador for it. I also had some experience of supervising adoptions when I was a social worker, but that was a very long time ago so I am not sure that it is really a relevant interest because the legislation and everything else was very different.

One of the things that were different in those days was that most children who were placed for adoption were babies. When I hear the rhetoric about adoption from the Government at the moment, I sometimes suspect that they still think that that is the case. The reality is that most children being placed for adoption now, before the changes, are not babies, and that if the Bill as it stands becomes law, that will be even more true.

I have worked with and still know several people who are both foster parents and adopters; some are just foster parents and some are just adopters, while others have done both. They perform a remarkable job. Far too often we take for granted the work, the commitment and emotional support that they put in and the trauma that their lives and their families are put through, and it is very important that we do not do that.

I have concerns about this issue. Even when I was a social work student, I did an adoption supervision and took it to court. I was very impressed with, and supported, the judgment and the words of the presiding judge. I know that you really have to get the law right. You have to ensure that the family understand their rights, and that the adoptive family understand not only their rights but the rights of the parents who are placing their children for adoption.

We are talking here about going to a further stage, where the parents are not placing the children for adoption but the local authority will decide that there should be permanence, and therefore fostering for adoption should be considered. That is legally a new situation. I need convincing by the Minister that the Government have done the work to ensure that the family court will not then come back and say, “Actually, we are not convinced that the rights of this child and its natural family were properly considered in your decision around permanence and therefore around placing for fostering up to adoption”. That means that when the case gets to court for adoption, the judge may then be tempted to say, “I’m not convinced that this is in the interests of the child or that the process has ensured that the rights of the child, which are expressed very clearly in all sorts of places, including the UN convention, have actually had due attention paid to them”. We would then be putting social workers and local authorities in an invidious position, and we really have to take account of that.

--- Later in debate ---

I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, that if an individual local authority is really failing, the powers are already there to move those duties to someone else who can do it better in the interests of the children. So I am not sure why we need subsection (3)(a) either, so long as there was some way for local authorities, first, to know what was expected of them and, secondly, to be able to review in some way—it could be a judicial review; I take the point made by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss—if they believed that the decision was wrong. In natural justice, you have to have some sort of appeal process. However, the idea of the Secretary of State implementing subsection (3)(b) in a large way—and subsection (3)(c) at all—fills me with horror, because children would suffer.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I have listened with great interest to this debate. I remember the last days of the previous Government, when there was a great deal of concern from the Minister responsible at the lack of uptake by local authorities of voluntary adoption agencies. She repeated on several occasions, “The evidence is there; the outcomes are better; but it seems that local authorities have the perception that going down that route is more expensive”. Again, there was some debate about the research, but I think it pointed to the fact that in fact it was no more expensive than using local authority adopters. This is just a detail, but I would be interested to know what progress has been made—maybe the noble Baroness mentioned this and I may have missed it in what she was saying—in making better use of voluntary adoption agencies. There has been a huge amount of change in this area.

In the back of my mind, I also have an idea that it might be helpful for a one-page summary of all that has been done by the Government about adoption since they came into office. Maybe I just need to look back at the Second Reading debate; it is probably all there already in the Minister’s opening speech.

[Baroness Benjamin]

My Lords, much of Clause 3 is perfectly reasonable. It would allow the Secretary of State to take action against local authorities that were failing in their duties to recruit adopters by removing those powers from them—quite rightly, too, as long as that is done in a fair way and takes account of steps that local authorities might be taking to improve. There is, after all, an adoption crisis in the country, which the Minister has pointed out, and some local authorities are not stepping up to the plate.

However, children’s charities such as Barnardo’s—I declare an interest as one of its vice-presidents—as well as the Local Government Association have concerns about the fact that the Bill as it stands would allow the Secretary of State to remove responsibility for adopter recruiting from all local authorities. This proposal has caused alarm, which could lead to chaos in the adoption system. There is no guarantee that external providers would be able or willing to take on these services immediately, and any delays across the system will severely damage the chances of some of the country’s most vulnerable children of being adopted. Of course local authorities should be held to account; it is right that the Government can intervene if they are not doing their job properly. However, Clause 3 as it stands effectively allows the collective punishment of local authorities, and this punishment, as Barnardo’s and others have pointed out, would not even solve the problem but would make it worse. I urge the Government to consider Clause 3 very carefully and remove it from these provisions.